RED’s RAW patent cracks in Japan as Eli Roth’s hand-drawn animation turns out to be AI
Every claim in this business survives until someone checks and this week, someone checked twice.
Hi everyone!
Happy Saturday.
It’s been a busy week at Eddie AI: lots of updates including making it much faster to from import to being ready to edit and to the timeline editor to support complex pro workflows, elegantly. (If you haven’t tried Eddie in awhile, you’ll be surprised by how much it has evolved.)
But a validating moment for me this week was my wife wanted to edit a video for her best friend Zahra, who is getting married today. The edit is a collection of all their friends remembering special moments over the years with Zahra. My wife used Eddie, of course. She asked it for two different arcs. She chose the one which interspersed soundbites from all the friends together versus the one where each friends’ video plays back to back.
She tinkered a bit with generative music options and then had Eddie cut it to the track she wanted. It did, with auto-ducking. She added intro and outro titles and tweaked the color. Then she sent the MP4 export to Zahra’s fiancé to play at the wedding today.
The whole edit took her 25% of the time she would have spent in CapCut. And she got a better edit as she had more capabilities at her disposal.
At least my wife now knows what I am actually doing every single day. ;)
Speaking of wife and updates: Eddie AI won for best post production tech at CineGear! We made a video and I mentioned her in it as she says I don’t celebrate my wins enough:
This week we also released our latest long form article, a celebration of the movers and shakers who sought to push, pull and cajole our industry forward. This one is on that bookstore that became a movie studio. Make sure to check it out.
The Price and the Open Door: How a Hollywood Prince Infiltrated Amazon (And Built an Empire Before Burning It Down)
How a bookseller got into the movie-making game
Have a really great weekend.
—Shamir
Co-founder & CEO, Eddie AI, the AI AE for video pros (and those who make wedding videos for their friends ;) )
Also this week:
Eli Roth said he hand-drew his animation when the credits said otherwise. Letterboxd locked 30 million users. Matthew McConaughey gets his own cinema. And YouTube just made it twice as hard to get paid.
Render Reel
YouTube overhauls Partner Program and creators aren’t pleased. From February 2027, earning from Shorts requires 10 million qualified views in the previous 90 days and new applicants need 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views. This is roughly double the previous standard and YouTube says total payouts will rise. Critics aren’t too sure.
Eli Roth got caught using AI in Ice Cream Man after claiming he’d hand-drawn the animated sequences himself. He told Polygon he personally drew the Fleischer-style loop cycles but once the credits revealed AI VFX firm Dark Half, that became “I misspoke. AI was used in a very small portion of a few scenes.” The film opened at 32% on Rotten Tomatoes so the cover-up is currently outperforming the crime.
RED Camera RAW patent crumbles in Japan
Compressed RAW has been one of the most fiercely guarded pieces of IP in the camera business. So well guarded that Nikon’s eventual answer to was to completely acquire RED, the company that held it the patent.
Panasonic then took the patent to Japan’s Intellectual Property High Court and won.
The court found that RED couldn’t sufficiently distinguish its patent from a piece of prior art designed for something as entirely mundane as reducing memory usage with buffered images.
Both of RED’s key technical distinctions failed examination.
Pre-demosaic processing was already present in the earlier reference and the “pre-emphasis” preprocessing step was also drawn too broadly to exclude ordinary gamma correction.
The ruling only applies in Japan and doesn't touch RED and Nikon's patents anywhere else but the jurisdiction isn't really what makes this interesting.
Patent fights in this industry almost always end in private settlements, and every settlement keeps the patent's actual strength a secret. But that’s not what happening here as there’s no settlement.
And the arguments are now on record making this case a rare public view on exactly where a court decided the moat was thinner than claimed.
Relatedly, Nikon cut its full-year camera forecast after sales dropped 22% in a single quarter. Body sales fell from 270K to 210K units year-on-year and they also trimmed its estimate for the entire global interchangeable-lens market by 300K units which is a huge revision to make in three months.
A car photography company is suing Midjourney for allegedly training on tens of thousands of its images. EVOX Productions has pretty much shot every US car model since 2000 and they’re accusing Midjourney of stripping watermarks before training. And then also building a product that competes directly with EVOX’s licensing business. Midjourney is already fighting Disney and Warner Bros. so this isn’t great timing.
A filmmaker shot a feature horror film entirely on an iPhone using Blackmagic’s free camera app. James Demitri’s Fire Alive was shot in five days (edited in two) and took finalist honours at SF3 Film festival. He says the app’s locked exposure and white balance outperformed some of his larger-format productions in low light.
Letterboxd crashed for six hours, locking out 30 million users. Over 1,000 complaints hit DownDetector within the hour and the outage lands weeks after reports of possible acquisition. Some corners of social media tried connecting the dots.
Steven Soderbergh’s $24.99 Jaws app launched back in June and remains one of best film education apps around. Every day of the production is broken down with Spielberg’s own notes, and even includes an epilogue Soderbergh wrote himself.
Disney lets TikTok creators use its film clips for first time. Titles include properties like Star Wars and Toy Story. The move follows the collapse of its OpenAI/Sora deal, and makes it clear that Hollywood is moving from marketing at fans to arming them.
Alamo Drafthouse names theatre after Matthew McConaughey. The Austin Mueller location will now be named the Matthew McConaughey Cinema, with the actor introducing an early screening of The Rivals of Amziah King. He joins a list of filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Spike Lee in Alamo’s tradition of naming screens after them.
This week we’re watching:
The phenakistoscope was a 19th-century trick (predating cinema) that faked motion using sequential drawings and a strobing glimpse but in 2026 Artist Yohei Kisanuki has revived the trick entirely by hand.
Kisanuki only usess ink and arithmetic but it’s the same optical loophole the entire moving image is built on.
Great watch that proves some tricks never needed an update.
Retail Therapy: Gold-plated surveillance
Dubai luxury house Caviar has done to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses what Cavalli did to everything else.
Underneath the gold, it’s still a camera on your face and the recording indicator is still a tiny LED nobody across the room will ever clock (hopefully).
$6,139 at caviar.global.